I'm primarily a C/C++ programmer, but I whack at Perl now and again.

In my job, I deal with lots of large files, and do my production work in C/C++ for the speed and memory efficiency. (Yeah, I know that line is overworked, but I'm packing stuff together and still approach memory limits!)

But what perl is *absolutely beautiful* for is answering the odd questions that come up. With the DBI, Spreadsheet, et. al. modules, I can often find exactly what I'm looking for in a short time, and send it onwards in a presentable fashion.

What initially 'hooked' me on perl was the DBI package and the regular expressions. What I tell my friends when I'm trying to convince them to give perl a try, I just tell 'em how much time I save by having it at my fingertips.

Once I help 'em out a few times with a quickie perl script, they start to get interested. Then it's a quick jump to http://www.cygwin.com.

...roboticus